diverting candy right on your phone—the tiny dopamine lift.
All of this points in one direction: into the ditch. The person who graduates from school and pursues an aesthetic pattern of life often ends up in the ditch. It’s only then that they realize the truth that somehow nobody told them: Freedom sucks.
Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.
THREE
The Insecure Overachiever
If one group of young people approach adulthood as an aesthetic experience, another group tries to treat adulthood as much as possible like a continuation of school. These students usually went to competitive colleges and tend to come from the upper strata of society. They were good at getting admitted into places, so they apply to companies that have competitive hiring procedures. As students, they enjoyed the borrowed prestige of high-status colleges, so as adults they enjoy the borrowed prestige of high-status companies and service organizations. As students, they were good at winning gold stars, and so they follow a gold-star-winning kind of life when they enter the workforce, and their parents get to brag that they work at Google or Williams & Connolly, or that they go to Harvard Business School.
This group of emerging adults are pragmatists. They are good at solving problems. The problem for a college junior and senior is anticipated ambiguity. Graduation is approaching, and you don’t know what comes next. The pragmatists solve this problem by flocking to companies and such that can tell them, even as juniors in college, what they will be doing for at least a few years hence. The uncertainty is over. Plus, now they will have a good answer when adults ask them, as they are prone to do, what they are going to do after graduation. In order to keep the existential anxiety about what to do with their life carefully suppressed underneath the waterline of consciousness, they grab the first job that comes along.
Unfortunately, this pragmatic route doesn’t spare you from the ditch, either. Never underestimate the power of the environment you work in to gradually transform who you are. When you choose to work at a certain company, you are turning yourself into the sort of person who works in that company. That’s great if the culture of McKinsey or General Mills satisfies your very soul. But if it doesn’t, there will be some little piece of yourself that will go unfed and get hungrier and hungrier.
Moreover, living life in a pragmatic, utilitarian manner turns you into a utilitarian pragmatist. The “How do I succeed?” questions quickly eclipse the “Why am I doing this?” questions.
Suddenly your conversation consists mostly of descriptions of how busy you are. Suddenly you’re a chilly mortal, going into hyper-people-pleasing mode anytime you’re around your boss. You spend much of your time mentor shopping, trying to find some successful older person who will answer all your questions and solve all your problems. It turns out that the people in your workplace don’t want you to have a deep, fulfilling life. They give you gold stars of affirmation every time you mold yourself into the shrewd animal the workplace wants you to be. You’ve read those Marxist analyses of the bosses exploiting the workers. Suddenly it occurs to you that you have become your own boss and your own exploiter. You begin to view yourself not as a soul to be uplifted but as a set of skills to be maximized.
It’s fascinating how easy it is to simply let drop those spiritual questions that used to plague you, to let slide those deep books that used to define you, to streamline yourself into a professional person.
Furthermore, workaholism is a surprisingly effective distraction from emotional and spiritual problems. It’s surprisingly easy to become emotionally avoidant and morally decoupled, to be less close to and vulnerable with those around you, to wall off the dark jungle deep inside you, to gradually tamp down the highs and lows and simply live in neutral. Have you noticed how many people are more boring and half-hearted at age thirty-five than they were at twenty?